


hardy and hale (or, how to heal a leprechaun)

by TheBlackestFrost



Series: Helping Hands [1]
Category: American Gods (TV), American Gods - Neil Gaiman
Genre: Angst, F/M, Sexual Tension
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2019-11-03
Updated: 2019-11-03
Packaged: 2021-01-21 00:03:15
Rating: Mature
Warnings: Creator Chose Not To Use Archive Warnings
Chapters: 1
Words: 2,848
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/21290381
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/TheBlackestFrost/pseuds/TheBlackestFrost
Summary: His brain still feels on fire but his body is cooling, and those cold hands are pressing ice against his forehead and mouth, cool liquid slipping between his parched lips, and he wonders if this is what humans feel when they take care of one another.A moment on the road where Sweeney is hit with a fever and Laura needs him back in action.
Relationships: Laura Moon/Mad Sweeney
Series: Helping Hands [1]
Series URL: https://archiveofourown.org/series/1536634
Comments: 8
Kudos: 54





	hardy and hale (or, how to heal a leprechaun)

He doesn’t get sick.

How could he? Him, mythical creature held together with shreds of belief and scraps of magic and maybe a little fierceness of his own refusal to cark it until he’s good and fuckin’ well ready (and he’s not, not yet, especially with things actually happening and an end pretty fuckin’ nigh and a glorious debt to repay and nothing at all to do with the small and incredibly bitchy cunt whose orbit he’s been caught in by way of bad luck and worse misfortune).

There are some basics that come with the otherworldliness; he heals faster, hits harder, moves quicker (though, if he’s honest with himself this has been slowing down more and more as belief fades, and while he can still heal up faster than a normal human, the strength is more size related than superhuman, and speed he’s not bothered working on in some time).

It’s not like bacteria and viruses should be an issue.

It just doesn’t fucking happen. Not to him.

Except, sometimes it does.

Sometimes a strain is foreign enough, has incubated in some kind of believer or person who’s had contact with a god or something else to boost their immune system, to actually be a nuisance.

It’s happened but a few times over his many (many) centuries, and when it does, it goes all out.

“Jesus Christ!” Her exclamation of disgust makes him flinch mid-retch.

He doesn’t even glance up from his position slumped over the toilet bowl (clinging on like a spring breaker encountering their first jello-shot), doesn’t try to focus on at her silhouette in the bathroom door of another seedy motel room, doesn’t dig deep enough to tell her to fuck off.

He wants to. He loves telling her that.

He’s too busy puking up everything he’s ever even thought of consuming and sweating harder than when he was first brought to this wretched continent (the heat, the change, it had been an adjustment). His entire undershirt is clinging to him, jacket and suspenders long stripped but the vomiting had started before he could unclothe any further, and he wants nothing more than to crawl naked into a bucket of ice and stay there forever.

Her voice is poisonous.

“What the fuck is wrong with you? Is this the leprechaun version of a hangover? You’ve drunk twice as much as you had last night on mornings when you were bored.”

He groans, gasping for air and cringing against the acrid scent in the bowl but unable to properly move himself away. His lungs burn as he speaks. 

“Siiick.”

The word comes out a hanging rasp, and he doesn’t elaborate further (later he’ll explain, refusing to look at her and letting her refuse to look at him. He'll tell her how mythical creatures can still get fevers sometimes, about the times it happens, but not right now).

He hears her move into the bathroom and become still, can feel her standing close to him but not moving.

“Ok, well…quit it. We need to get moving in the morning.”

Isn’t she lovely?

He cannot remember this kind of heat, not ever, and he can feel sweat running from his hair into his eyes, stinging. He needs to communicate, to tell her it’ll pass but he doesn’t know how long, to tell her to leave him to the heat and the cold tap in the shower he is dying to reach for but lacking the strength to do so. He just needs to summon enough strength to be clear and direct without escalating anything (because they do love to escalate, seeming to seek it out even in spaces where it shouldn’t be an option).

He can do this. He was a king once. A god. A bird. He can do this.

He draws in a shaky breath.

“Fuuuck. Oofff.”

The retching starts up again before he can deal with whatever she decided to dole out, but as he continues to empty bile and nothing more into the bowl his brain stops paying attention to her. The last time he was like this it was back in Essie’s time, 3 full days of this heat and retching rendering him useless (the farm had lost a crop, despite Essie’s bowl of milk). He’d made it up to her with a new grandchild and she’d sung songs from the old country.

His brain is obviously liquefying because he swears he can hear the songs now. 

When the vomiting (is it still vomiting when you're empty, or just dry heaving?) slows and it’s just the heat again, the horrible heat, he becomes aware of a patch of air near him that’s cool. Before he can think on it he feels it move, then hears the hiss of the shower coming to life.

He’s too weak and too hot and too fucking miserable to shift his head, but he jerks when he feels something icy pressing firmly against the back of his neck, as if to alert him to her presence. It’s blissful against the boiling of his skin, and he leans into it with a hum of relief.

The hands move, carving cold marks down his back and against the skin above his pants, stripping his undershirt off, peeling it back so that the cool air hits his skin. She manages to get it over his head with no help from him, shifting to pull it forward over his arms.

Later he'll wonder why she didn't swear or hit him, right now he barely registers the movement beyond the bliss of those cold hands. 

The shower is running on cold, he can feel the moisture in the atmosphere, and then he’s being pulled up by those freezing hands and unnaturally strong arms, his body weight supported (though the logistics of their height differences are making it difficult).

He turns with a groan to throw an arm over thin shoulders, trusting her skinny form to take his weight. He’s rewarded by the arms around his waist tightening as she moves him over to the shower. As the cold spray hits his overheated skin he groans again, the fever and delirium wipe away any sense of pride, and the sound he makes is not just one of relief.

Cold water and icy hands become the centre of his world. 

He slumps against the wall of the shower, legs barely able to hold him up, but her cool form is still pressed against his side, arm around his waist (barely), and he feels himself being lowered carefully to the ground.

He feels her pulling off his boots and socks, and then nothing for a moment before her hands at his belt make him jump.

The water sloughs the sweat from his face and he opens his eyes to see her pulling off his belt, eyeing him defiantly, as if daring him to be gross about it.

He's never liked to disappoint a lady so he summons every last ounce of energy to grin at her.

“Takin’ advantage, love?”

She rolls her eyes.

“These have to dry before morning.”

She manages to get the wet pants off him, her hair now clinging to her neck under the spray, and he shifts and hisses as those icy hands drag the material down his legs.

His body, with appalling and yet completely unsurprising timing, notices the thin material of her shirt clinging to her form, all high breasts and raised scars. He feels himself twitch and swell, some dark recess of his brain wondering if, in life, she’d been a biter.

He thought so.

“Seriously?”

He shrugs, even that movement taking energy, the weakness of the fever still lending him a frightening lack of shame.

“Must be the fever.”

He sees her glance down again (he has no understanding as to why humans wear underwear, nor desire to find out), and even through his illness he registers the slight widening of her eyes and pursing of her lips. Nice to have somewhere he can surprise her that’s hard to insult (he’s a big guy everywhere, he knows this, but his happily petty lizard brain makes note of the implications).

He’s about to mock her when, still staring (far away? right there? it’s hard to tell), her white teeth bite down on her lower lip and his brain shorts out. Her cold hands tighten minutely against his thighs and the movement forces a low growl out of his throat (how would they feel against his throat right now? how cool would her thighs be against either side of his head?).

She looks up at him.

There’s a pause then and he sees it, even through the fever and her milky fucking eyes, he sees it and he knows.

If he shifted, gripped her arm, if he moved towards her at all she’d be there with him. Hand wrapped around his cock, dry dead mouth on his, both of them tasting of vomit and desperation and giving in to something neither would say.

He considers it.

He’s too weak to take her the way he would want to (the way that he’s thought about taking her in stolen cars riddled with the scent of decay, in motel rooms alone gripping himself and saying her name like a fucking prayer). It wouldn’t be hard, or rough, wouldn’t be the testing and pushing the limits of that tiny (decaying, rotting, what is wrong with him?) body that he’s fantasised over. It would be slower, under the water, facing one another, her in his lap as he stared at her (can the dead still come apart? He'd want to see that, want to know the sounds she made and the shape of her mouth in ecstacy). If he was lucky he’d have enough energy to clutch at her, feel the ridges of her spine, paw and pinch and bite at her nipples (would the nerve endings still fire? would she gasp or stare at him in blank annoyance, their contact just more evidence of a body that should be long in the ground?).

He won't. He knows he won't. 

It would leave marks on them both that neither could ever scrub away, either catalysing feelings that neither wants, or failing miserably as decay and centuries of belief met in a sad, pathetic moment.

He spares them both, and mocks her instead.

“Like what ya see?”

The moment passes, her eyes narrow and he prepares for venom.

“Just seeing if the carpet matches the drapes.”

His heads lolls back against the wall as she moves her hands, sitting back on her haunches and reaching for a towel, and the loss of contact makes him hiss quietly. The cold water and colder hands have roused him some, and when he feels them return, pulling him up and wrapping a towel around his waist, he stifles the sigh of relief.

She helps him into the bedroom, tiny figure holding him upright, not commenting as his bulk rests awkwardly against her shoulders and his weak steps take time.

She dumps him unceremoniously on the bed and he hisses as she strips away the towel, only to find himself relieved again when she brings it back soaked in the cold water from the shower. She disappears again, leaving him with the weak air-con for a few moments before returning with a bucket of ice. She wedges it against his side and begins running the ice over his chest and shoulders and it’s such a strange idea that he wants to laugh but she’s sat on top of him to do it and though she’s careful to sit over his stomach, he’s still unwilling to piss her off and have her play pop the testicle.

Besides, the ice is helping.

His brain still feels on fire but his body is cooling, and those cold hands are pressing ice against his forehead and mouth, cool liquid slipping between his parched lips, and he wonders if this is what humans feel when they take care of one another. He wonders if she did this for her husband, long before he was Wednesday’s man.

In his heart he knows she did.

From her expression he knows it was for sex and pleasure but never to break fevers, sees her struggling to consider the whys and wherefores of that. She is not used to nurturing, in actions or spirit, and is jarred by it. 

Still doing it. 

The thought makes him feel peace, deep in his aching bones, that he has not felt in some time.

As she moves, wiping away his sweat with a cold facecloth and replacing its path with cool ice, he feels himself getting drowsy, her patterns soothing in a way that he does not associate with her, with this, with them, with here. If she minds his shaking hands gripping her sharp hips lightly, she doesn’t say anything.

He must have drifted, because he’s imagining being healthy and hale and her being alive, properly alive, small breasts bouncing as he fucks her roughly on the hood of a car and there are ravens watching and then…

She slaps him once, hard, cold and perfect, and he’s awake. He can tell by the narrowed eyes and his now tight grip on her hips that he’s shifted her down and rutted against her and apparently that’s the wrong move for when someone seems to be actually, genuinely (if for entirely selfish reasons relating to wanting to find resurrection and reunite with their husband and not having much time to wait out fevers given their own rapid decay) taking care of you.

He’s so hard it’s almost as painful as the fever and it’s enough that he wants to do it again and again (rutting, slapping and all) but she’s stilled her movements and he’s convinced that a wrong move on his part will end in testicle popping (or worse, her getting off him and this strange moment in time disappearing because of his own stupidity). Instead, he holds himself still, closes his eyes, and thinks of green hills and dark woods and salty water and the sounds of home. He feels himself starting to sink again at the same time her hands return to their patterns.

His last memory is an icy cold hand on either side of his head, her cool body in his lap.

He feels peace.

***

When he wakes it is morning, sunlight just starting to pierce through the ugly curtains.

He’s sprawled on the bed, cold wet towel over his nether regions and nothing else. By the temperature the towel has been replaced since he’d passed out, and he files that away for future consideration (didja look again, lass?).

His fever has broken, the shuddering feeling and weakness has drained away overnight, and he’s hungry and thirsty and horny and filled with that relief one experiences in the aftermath of pain or discomfort. He sits up, looking for her.

She’s in the chair near the television, and whether it’s because his body takes up far too much room, or because she has no desire to be near him, he can’t tell. He doesn’t care though (why the fuck would he?).

The screen is off and she’s not asleep but clearly not there, the strange twilight meditation that she sometimes enters these days. She’s so still she could be dead (well, deader than she already is, which is pretty fuckin’ dead).

He moves, slipping into the bathroom and showering away the last remnants of the fever sweat, scrubbing his hair and pulling on his nearly dry pants (the undershirt is binned immediately) and shirt.

He lights a cigarette as he re-enters the bedroom, where she’s still in the chair, still drifting.

The morning light hits her skin and gives it warmth, vitality, creating a memory of life. With her eyes closed there is no milky film making her look like a ghost, the bomber jacket hiding the sutures barely holding her thin body together. Full lips and a peaceful expression, brown hair damp (from the shower, the one she put him in, risking further decay and rot by spending those few moments in the water). She is beautiful in a way that makes part of him ache, and he gives himself a moment longer to stare without thinking too hard on the why of it all, smoking and watching.

He throws a pillow at her head, breaking her reverie, and she thrashes upright, cursing.

If their morning in the car is quieter, if their jibes are less venomous, then neither feels the need to point it out. He won’t say thank you (why would he, she just needs him healthy enough to keep being her bitch in this game) and he knows she won’t ask how he’s feeling (why should she care? he’s moving, isn’t he?).

And if at one point he glances at her and sees her bite gently on her lower lip, an almost-smile at the corner of her mouth, her eyes on the road but her head elsewhere, then so be it.

**Author's Note:**

> Thank you so much for reading! Very new, any comments/ideas etc welcome x


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